How’s the Path to Become a CNA like?
More Answers From Certified Nursing Assistants
Video Transcript
Host Question: How do you become a certified nursing assistant?
Guest Answer: At a high level, can you kind of explain what that educational path is, the certifications or tests that you have to pass?
To become a CNA, I was six eighteen when I did mine.
So, obviously, I couldn’t go up to a college, but I went to a tech college in my local area and did a summer course. And it was three months long, and it was Monday through Friday, and it was all hands on. So you’ll watch a video, and then you’ll go in and test on your classmates, you’ll test on the dummies that are in there. And I really like the hands on.
I learn better by doing it myself than just watching someone else do it. So, typically, it’s four to eight weeks long of classes depending on if you’re doing an advanced course or not. And you can do them online You can do, like, quick courses on the computer. But either way, for the testing, you have to go in and do a proctored written test.
If you pass that test, then you do what is a skills test that is through the state. So each state has different requirements.
But for Utah, we went in and there was me and someone else and then two people judging us. We had to do vitals first. So it was a two headed stethoscope. And we had to be within five of what they were. So if we were within five, we passed and we could do the other skills. But if we didn’t pass the vitals, then you had to schedule and do it again.
Guest Answer: One of the things that’s attractive about a CNA is that it it’s very much an entry level position, and you don’t need any kind of college degree. You don’t, in fact, even need a diploma or even a GED to get into it. So that opens it up for people who might have other doors closed. And you need to find an accredited CNA program.
And sometimes those are through, like, a a community college or a nursing schools sometimes nursing homes are actually sponsoring their own classes now. A class class takes somewhere between one and three months, usually, somewhere usually around one hundred and sixty hours. So you’ll spend a lot of time front in a classroom environment learning some of the knowledge, and then the other half of the time you spend out in the field doing clinical training. So you’re actually interacting with the patients or residents of long term care facilities, shadowing current CNAs, and actually doing the hands on work with you know, a precept or a trainer yourself.
When you complete the program, there’s gonna be an exam. And then after that, there’s also a skills portion of the test. Where a nurse trainer will ask you to do. From a list of about twenty five skills, they’ll randomly choose about five.
So you’ll have to go in and demonstrate that you know how to do these skills. And they might be things like let’s put a place a bed pan and remove a bed pan from a bed bound person. Let’s transfer a person from a bed to a wheelchair. Let’s help this person brush their teeth or take their blood pressure, just things along those lines.
And so for each one, you have to demonstrate, you know, that you know the whole process. You have to remember to introduce yourself and wash your hands and provide for privacy and all those types of things. Once you get through that, then you’re certified by the the state, and you do have to renew your certification every two years. Renewing isn’t very hard.
It it’s basically just answering questions. You don’t necessarily have to have any continuing.
Education, but you do need to have maintained paid employment as a CNA for the number of hours varies from state to state, but somewhere around four at least four hundred hours a year. And that’s not really that many.
Guest Answer: For the STNA, I know that you have to take a course over a couple weeks And then you have to take practical hours where we went into a nursing home and make sure we could do all the skills as, like, taking vitals, emptying, urine bags, you know, that type of thing, changing beds, all that kind of stuff. And then to be state tested, you had to go and sign up and do a written test, and then you had to do, like, a they gave you, like, a booklet to study, and they would give you so many skilled tests and you’d have to do it in front of, like, a proctor. It was kind of intense, like, looking back, I was really nervous. Even though I knew, like, you know, I practice a lot and so but even if you don’t wash your hands you can sell.
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